For Christmas, my awesome brother (Donnie) got me a decently sized LaCie Iamakey [Amazon] along with a few other awesome items. He remembered it from a year or two ago on an old list! Total surprise, and a great one. I’ve been eye-ing one for a while since I’m in need of multiple backups of my research work and thesis writing.

I do do manual backups, and in particular have a drive mirrored using rsync in osX so that it’s bootable (old computers and poor grad-students tend to make for older hard-drives). However, I wanted something a bit faster and easier to use. I wanted an automatic (or semiautomatic) backup of critical writings or data.Read More »

In the time I’ve been doing my research work at the Univ. of IL, I’ve come across a number of graphs from various past researchers, older papers, stuck on the side of machines (calibration curves), and even hand-drawn or chart-recorder graphs in my numerous projects. The only major problem with those graphs I’ve found is that they aren’t in a digital form for further use with other data (instrument response functions) or to include in your own work as a reference. So, what to do?

Well, there’s an easy solution. It’s not the perfect solution, as it’s a bit slow, I’ll get to that in a second, but it’s a great solution to the problem, and has worked for me a number of times now. To top it off, it’s open-source, donation-ware, and cross-platform: Engauge Digitizer (see post at LifeHacker.com). Don’t let the website and lack of recent updates deter you. Tools that can do what Engauge does are few and far between. So, it is definitely worth a try. Here’s an example of how I’ve used it just the other day (prompting this post- I’ve used it for years now, but the recent use reminded me I should share it with others). [click "More" to see an example use and learn more]

For those friends of mine currently attempting to work in LaTeX to code Materials Science and Engineering related tidbits…

Here’s a quick tip. Tired of typing all those crazy math commands for your material’s name? Simply use a new command. Here’s are a couple examples…

%Simpler way of writing CUINSE2:
\newcommand{\cis}{CuInSe$_{2}$}
%Simpler way of writing CUINGASE2:
\newcommand{\cigs}{CuIn$_{(1-x)}$Ga$_{x}$Se$_{2}$}
%Simpler way of writing CUGASE2:
\newcommand{\cgs}{CuGaSe$_{2}$}

To see how this looks in compiled LaTeX output and another example, click “More”…Read More »

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More of Me

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A Quick Introduction...

I'm a graduate student (PhD Candidate) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I've studied and researched in two fields of Materials Science and Engineering (Polymers and Semiconductors). My interests are as diverse as my musical tastes and I usually have my hand in some crazy project during my free time.

I'm available for consulting and have access to a world-renown materials research user-facility supported by the D.O.E. If you would like to know more, please contact me.